Ecological Care Solutions was founded by Sineke Ndhlovu and three friends, two of whom she met through working with food banks. Every month Sineke collects a supply from FareShare Midlands and then each of them takes a quarter of the food and shares it with people in need in different parts of Leicester.

When the COVID19 pandemic started, Sineke and her friends decided to join the group of people who were organising food parcels for vulnerable members of the community. Often the recipients did not have work or were trying to get their benefits sorted out. The team had always involved in helping families with children that were struggling to learn English. Sineke, in her role as a teacher, would give extra support to children with parents who had come from other countries and were trying to adapt.

Sineke and her friends also wanted to offer a helping hand to struggling parents, with the idea that families in need could rethink how to use their money. They said what would happen if you had X amount of meals to cover you for the week or if we meet you halfway with this food parcel, how much would you save from your shopping and what other essential items would you be able to then afford?.

When they started, the team were sharing their own food with people, and they are still self-funding. In order to give people larger amounts of food, they talked about how much they were spending on shopping in a month, and then agreed that they would contribute £50 each to pay for a FareShare membership. As well as being able to increase the amount and variety of foods, the team like the FareShare mission to prevent good food going to waste, and see it as an initiative to help save the planet. They wanted to help utilise the surplus food to help others and simultaneously create a smaller carbon footprint.

After realising that sometimes people in the community were embarrassed to use a food bank, the team wanted to try and overcome this. They said:

"It's just you helping to save the planet, it's your contribution towards making sure that good food is not going to waste."

The team named the charity Ecological Care Solutions as it's a deliberately neutral term, so that a person can use the food bank and not feel stigmatised or excluded.

Users are mainly families on low income with schoolchildren. Sineke found these families by visiting local primary schools and speaking to the Head Teachers, to find out which pupils were still at risk despite having access to breakfast clubs. Often these children come from large families where the parents are on a low income and find the costs related to school very expensive. In order to afford everything, sometimes the parents find they have to cut back on food or buy cheaper, less healthy/balanced foods.

Sineke says:

"I have one special case where the 32 year old father, originally from Afghanistan, has 5 children all under the age of 8. Unfortunately, the mother (who might have been suffering from postnatal depression) walked out 9 months ago, when the youngest was only 6 months old. The father has had to leave his job to take care of the children. Without his income, the father had to use his benefits to cling onto the family car, which was on HP. This left him desperate and struggling to afford food. To find out how to cook the ingredients we have given him, so that the children will eat them, he has been watching YouTube videos and calling his Mom. There have been times that I have spoken to his Mom on his behalf, to help him talk through what should happen with the children. Social Services are involved, but they will not help financially. Prior to the mother leaving, the father was a successful carpenter, who never struggled to make money for his family and things happen and your life can change overnight."

In addition, the Team has a few elderly people who have type 2 diabetes and cannot afford the fresh food they're supposed to be eating. Ecological always have healthy veg (such as courgettes, strawberries and aubergines), brown bread and sometimes cholesterol lowering alternatives to milk, and it's great to see these pensioners managing their debilitating condition through healthy food.

Sainsburys Culturally Appropriate Food

Sainsburys recently provided funding which enabled FareShare Midlands to purchase culturally appropriate food for CFMs like Ecological. Sineke says:

"That was a very good initiative, we received a variety of staple foods for people who are of African and Asian origin, and some British people tried the recipes too - it was cultural food, but then it became food for everybody. As long as you share the recipes, if they know the nutritional value of the food, they will try it. For example, the yams were awesome, as they have all the minerals and you only need to eat a small amount to be satisfied. Therefore, this initiative was amazing.

People felt they were not just eating for survival, but that that they were enjoying something they really wanted and would have otherwise been unable to afford. It was great to have cassava, as they can be expensive, so by giving someone a whole cassava they were euphoric. It meant that people could save money heading towards the summer months and use that money to do an activity with the kids.

Another good thing about cassavas and yams is that you can peel them and freeze them, and then take them out and use them a bit at a time. People were using them for chips, for mash or telling me that you can even mix them with potato to make it last longer, so it's like a gold food, you can add a bit of gold to your potatoes as you go along.

People were using chickpeas to make curries and soups, adding them to noodles, and using them as a source of protein if they were having a meat-free diet. One of the great things with FareShare food is that you if get condiments and salad to go with it then boom, you're eating healthier than you might by going to the shop.

The cultural food made users excited. Some Jamaican and African-Caribbean families enjoyed putting the beans in the rice. I learned many ways of cooking as well, by listening to what others were going to use the food for and there were so many wonderful stories.

People were sprinkling the items onto their salads to give them a bit of life. The foods were very helpful and, importantly, they were very inclusive. Not just that, but having these different, cultural foods grew a feeling of community among the users. Some of the Asian families were asking how to use the foods, and one of the other users would say my Mom grew up in Africa, I'll ask her what this is and shell tell me what to do. It brought the users together, and it took people back to their roots."

Sineke says:

"FareShare is very, very helpful because it helps us access food we wouldn't have normally managed to access. It also gives a wide variety of food types, most of which can be chopped and frozen. FareShare gives us good quality food and we get everything in one place AND I don't have to travel to too many destinations looking for different stuff. Financially we can afford the package that has been offered and it's a good package, with foods our users prefer. It helps us, as we don't have to fundraise extra to meet the food needs of our users.

FareShare Midlands helps us to reduce the number of people who are struggling. We are problem-solvers AND we see this as an opportunity to solve a problem. All of us have background in teaching/social/care work and we feel as if we are fulfilling who we are. This makes life satisfying for us. We are also interested in looking after the planet in our own way. For us it has changed our lives, in that we understand the value of food. We were all brought up in Zimbabwe, our parents have cows, we understand the effort that farmers make in producing milk, and it cannot end up going down the drain.

We feel at home working with FareShare, working with food and making sure it's not wasted. We know what it's like if there isn't a beautiful meal cooking on the stove. Food does so many things, it creates relationships, and it can change the atmosphere in the house. The people who come to the food bank say FareShare is helping us to make a positive impact in their lives. They've eaten food from supermarkets and organic foods that under normal circumstances they would never have afforded. In a nutshell, FareShare has helped us to live our dream."

I would also like to say thank you very much Sainsburys and can you do it again.

FareShare - keep up the good work, you make me look good and you make me feel great!